Cárdenas Research Paper

Moreover, the nature of land reform was so far-reaching that not only were members of the US embassy wary of Cárdenas, conservative Mexican strongmen found him to be a threat. However, Cárdenas found an operative method of preserving his regime’s balance of power: “allowing the emergence of local political autonomy” as a loose form of control and as a buffer against local political rivalry. Demonstrated in the case of the gubernatorial elections of Oaxaca in 1936, Cárdenas threw his support behind a “relatively weak, unknown individual.” This action was not haphazard but calculated, as all of Cárdenas’s appointments proved to be. By selecting an unimposing governor, who would be reliant on the federal government for endorsement and execution
“The intervention of the State,” Cárdenas announced, “has to be increasingly great, increasingly frequent, and increasingly profound.” The implementation of the 1931 Law of Work gave reassurance of milder government reaction to workers’ strikes, exemplified by the occasion of more than 1,200 strikes in only the first half of 1935. Thus, the president’s relationship with the CTM, Confederation of Mexican Workers, grew into a formidable alliance, even if based purely on conditional labor backing, turning a ‘blind eye’ to other contentious
When economic recovery was hindered by the results of agrarian reform, slashed food production, and a population swell, the president took action. On May 18, 1938, Cárdenas ordered the expropriation of the majority of foreign oil companies functioning in Mexican borders. For years, these mainly United States and Great Britain based companies had extracted oil with minimal taxation. At the announcement, an immediate celebration in the streets of Mexico validated the weight of economic nationalism on everyday people’s lives: “Perhaps a quarter of a million paraded through the streets of the capital… never before, or after, did the nation display such solidarity.” Viewed in contextual scale, the formation of Petróleos Mexicanos along with another notable measure, the expropriation of the National Railways, propelled economic nationalism forward, leveling the economic terms of a country that had long been given “the short end of the stick.” These developments led to an amplified version of economic nationalism, preparing the way for future deliberation in other sectors of industry as illustrated by the 2014 constitutional amendments enabling nationalization of Mexico’s energy division in current